"In the past few weeks, I've managed to find a bit more free time to work on Haiku. As per usual, the lion's share of this time was spent on improving our integrated debugger. As such, I thought I'd give a brief overview of what's been added, and how it can be useful."

Anyone remember borland's dos turbo debuggers? They had the best debuggers by a long shot. It had syntax highlighting, flawless assembly & source code stepping, language variable awareness for watches, even remote debugging. Best of all it was very easy to use. I still curse every time I have to use gdb (even with a front end like 'ddd'), it is horrific. After all these years, I'm still looking for a debugger under linux that's remotely as good, something designed to work with assembly code. Has anyone else found something good?

Yes, there are many debuggers, but for other languages: like Java or C# have both excellent debuggers. If you want a good debugger for C++, GDB sometimes it works well if you use Eclipse's CDT or QtCreator (both offer a good frontend with threads/variables, etc.)

"Anyway, you will find that most IDEs now have integration with gdb (geanny, codeblocks, kdevelop, qt-creator, eclipse and 'kate', the last through plugin)."

It's a good list everyone's coming up with, thanks! I'd never heard of geanny, to be honest I don't want a new editor or IDE. I'd hesitate to use a kate debugger for the same reason, ideally I'd prefer a standalone debugger, much like gdb itself but with a good UI. Never the less I might try some of these text editors to see how suitable they are for debug work. BTW Codeblocks was my favourite of those in your list for C development.

Edit:
Back in the day for windows kernel developement, IDA Pro was pretty good, they're supposed to support linux now, but unless they changed they tarnished the product with DRM and even the starter edition costs a thousand dollars.

Eclipse CDT or QtCreator. It has been a long time since I touched KDevelop, so I don't know how it behaves nowadays.

Having had the chance to start developing software around 1986 while trying out quite a few development environments, I fail to understand how many developers like to develop in UNIX as if they were using System V!

Talk about time travel.

GDB has a very nice feature though, you can use it as a C/C++ REPL while the programming is running.

It was quite helpful in a project where I was doing a lot of low level stuff.

"Having had the chance to start developing software around 1986 while trying out quite a few development environments, I fail to understand how many developers like to develop in UNIX as if they were using System V!"

Can you clarify what you mean?

"GDB has a very nice feature though, you can use it as a C/C++ REPL while the programming is running."

You could watch & execute expressions in turbo debugger as well, dereference variables from pointers/structures. I cannot recall the full extent of the capability, and anyways it only applied to C & pascal (whereas I was using it more for assembly debugging). I vaguely remember being able to enter new assembly opcodes on the fly, although that might have only been debug.com.

"Eclipse CDT or QtCreator."

I guess it's time for me to try eclipse again, the last time I used it for a work project it was very bloated and slow.

No I had not, if it works well that could permanently replace all my use cases for ever invoking gdb directly. I'm not particularly fond of having to type gdb commands into a debugger, but maybe I am biased towards the interfaces I learned with.